FAIR founder Jeff Cohen and longtime FAIR associate Norman Solomon have compiled their 17th annual list of "P.U.-litzer Prizes" (OpEd News, 12/18/08). Among this year's "stinkiest media performances":

HOT FOR OBAMA PRIZE -- MSNBC's Chris Matthews

This award sparked fierce competition, but the cinch came on the day Obama swept the Potomac Primary in February--when Chris Matthews spoke of "the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama's speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don't have that too often."

BEYOND PARODY PRIZE--Fox News

In August, a FoxNews.com teaser for the O'Reilly Factor program said: "Obama bombarded by personal attacks. Are they legit? Ann Coulter comments."...

GUTTER BALL PUNDITRY AWARD -- Chris Matthews of MSNBC's Hardball

In program after program during the spring, Matthews repeatedly questioned whether Obama could connect with "regular" voters--"regular" meaning voters who are white or "who actually do know how to bowl." He once said of Obama: "This gets very ethnic, but the fact that he's good at basketball doesn't surprise anybody. But the fact that he's that terrible at bowling does make you wonder."

And there's plenty more malodorous journalism to be found in FAIR's extensive archive on corporate news coverage of the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

A major--and majorly disturbing--story of post-Katrina New Orleans is broken (12/17/08) by an independent reporter at the Nation who finds evidence of up to 11 black people shot by white vigilantes in one New Orleans neighborhood immediately after the hurricane. A.C. Thompson writes that

over the course of an 18-month investigation, I tracked down figures on all sides of the gunfire, speaking with the shooters of Algiers Point, gunshot survivors and those who witnessed the bloodshed. I interviewed police officers, forensic pathologists, firefighters, historians, medical doctors and private citizens, and studied more than 800 autopsies and piles of state death records. What emerged was a disturbing picture of New Orleans in the days after the storm, when the city fractured along racial fault lines as its government collapsed....

The new information should reframe our understanding of the catastrophe. Immediately after the storm, the media portrayed African-Americans as looters and thugs--Mayor Ray Nagin, for example, told Oprah Winfrey that "hundreds of gang members" were marauding through the Superdome. Now it's clear that some of the most serious crimes committed during that time were the work of gun-toting white males.

So far, their crimes have gone unpunished. No one was ever arrested for shooting [the black flood survivors]--in fact, there was never an investigation. I found this story repeated over and over during my days in New Orleans. As a reporter who has spent more than a decade covering crime, I was startled to meet so many people with so much detailed information about potentially serious offenses, none of whom had ever been interviewed by police detectives.

What exactly does it tell us that corporate outlets looking at the same region and time period dedicated their enormous news budgets to sensationalistic--and largely apocryphal--reports of black people looting and shooting one another, but never even gave a hint of race-based violence by whites?

See FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Demonizing the Victims of Katrina: Coverage Painted Hurricane Survivors as Looters, Snipers and Rapists" (11-12/05) by Jaime Omar Yassin

Associated Press TV writer Lynn Elber reports (12/18/08) the bad news that, "nearly a decade after the NAACP condemned a 'virtual whiteout' in broadcast TV, the civil rights group said major networks have stalled in their efforts to further ethnic diversity on-screen and off." Even worse,

television shows of the future could be even less inclusive because of a failure to cultivate young minority stars and to bring minorities into decision-making positions.... A "critical lack of programming by, for or about people of color" can be traced in part to the lack of minorities who have the power to approve new series or make final creative decisions, said Vicangelo Bulluck, executive director of NAACP's Hollywood bureau.

As remedy, Elber tells us that the report "calls on networks to revisit a 2000 agreement to diversify the ranks of actors, writers, directors and executives" and "also seeks to establish a task force with network executives, the NAACP and other civil rights groups."

Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Eric Boehlert on TV Diversity Study" (8/8/08)

David Ansen (Newsweek, 12/22/08) has a point when he says that the movie Borat "epitomized the [Bush] era." But he strikes a jarring note when he says:

Racism, misogyny and homophobia come pouring out of the mouths of [Sasha] Baron Cohen's unsuspecting dupes, and in a time of political correctness, when the slightest suggestion of bias on the lips of a public figure gets raked over the media coals, there was something fantastically liberating (and frightening) about seeing the national id so baldly exposed.

Presumably Ansen's thinking of someone like Don Imus, who was "raked over the media coals" not after he showed "the slightest suggestion of bias," but after years of wallowing in racist, homophobic and misogynist schtick with the tacit approval of his multitude of pals in the media elite.

In a media environment where the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage and Ann Coulter have wildly lucrative careers, there's no shortage of opportunities to get what Ansen calls the "national id" exposed--and celebrated.   What Borat provided--in the wake of the 2006 election's repudiation of Bushism--was an opportunity to see such creepiness ridiculed and scorned.  That's what makes the film, as Ansen rightly notes, a cultural landmark.

WeCanStopTheHate.org brings its fight against hate speech to online media with a post (12/10/08) about reports that Facebook board of directors member Peter Thiel "recently donated $1 million to the anti-immigrant group NumbersUSA," which the Southern Poverty Law Center "identified... as one of six core organizations in the anti-immigration movement."

Founded by John Tanton and directed by Roy Beck, who has written extensively on environmental and financial issues, NumbersUSA is the most calculating of the anti-immigration groups, offering information on the relationship between immigration and the environment. Regardless of apparent environmental sympathies, NumbersUSA supported Federation for American Immigration Reform and the American Immigration Control Foundation--SPLC-designated hate groups--in their immigrant-bashing billboard campaign. Beck has also been the Washington, D.C., editor of the Social Contract, a quarterly journal that has published articles by "white nationalists" such as Samuel Francis, who was fired from the conservative Washington Times after writing a racially inflammatory column, and James Lubinskas, a contributing editor to the racist American Renaissance magazine.

No. 1 on WeCanStopTheHate's list of how to "hold Thiel and Facebook accountable": Use Thiel's own medium to force his hand--"Invite friends to the grassroots page on Facebook that was launched in response to these reports." Over 2,000 members already have joined!

See the FAIR Press Release: "Questions About Source in Immigration Debate: Group Has Links to Racist Fund" (1/1/93)

There was an Editorial Observer piece in the New York Times today (12/4/08) that really read like a piece from the segregated South of the 1950s, taking the side of the Jim Crow-enforcing sheriff against the outside agitators.

The piece described an event at a church in Patchogue, N.Y., that encouraged immigrants to talk about hidden hate crimes in a community where a gang had allegedly targeted immigrants for a string of assaults that went unreported until the crimes escalated into the murder of Ecuadorean Marcelo Lucero. The church's pastor, working with an activist group, got immigrant crime victims to record their stories and tried to hook them up with lawyers. Then they held a press conference.

By the New York Times' account, that's pretty much all that happened. But in the Times' telling, it was headlined as "A Hate-Crime Circus." Times editorial writer Lawrence Downes described it as a "guilt fiesta," bizarrely equating it in his lead with the stabbing that it was a response to--both were "crimes against immigrants."

In the role of the put-upon sheriff trying to keep the Freedom Riders from stirring up the local colored folk, Downes has the Patchogue Mayor Paul Pontieri, Jr., who "kept a rueful watch from the edge of the circus ring":

Mr. Pontieri has spent a lot of time getting to know his Latino neighbors better and insists that they are not angry. There is confusion and sadness, he said, but the anger--like the teens accused of killing Mr. Lucero--comes from outside.

(Actually, the accused teens didn't come from very far outside Patchogue; some of them came from East Patchogue, while the others came from Medford, which is close enough to have the same high school.)

Downes thinks of himself as an advocate for immigrants. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Noam Chomsky points out that a Boston Globe analysis (11/9/08) of the Obama victory claims that the president-elect owes nothing to "traditional Democratic constituencies" like labor, women, ethnic minorities and the peace movement, because a "grassroots army of millions"--seemingly unconnected to such constituencies--"propelled" Obama's win.

It's worth noting, however, that this idea of a Democratic Party set free from the voting blocs that support it is a longstanding dream of corporate media and the political establishment--represented in the Globe piece by corporate Democrat Steve McMahon and conservative think-tanker Norman Ornstein. Ornstein, in fact, offers the same argument in the paper that he gave to CNN (11/14/92) during a similar round of "liberal interest group" bashing after Bill Clinton's election in 1992, when Ornstein claimed that Clinton "enters office with the fewest debts owed to interest groups in his own party of any Democratic president in modern times."

But the reality is not exactly as corporate media dream it. The Globe quotes McMahon--who it identifies as a "Democratic strategist," but not as a flak for PhRMA, the prescription drug lobby--as saying that Obama "owes nothing to anyone except the people who elected him." That's not actually how politics works, as any corporate lobbyist knows full well, but it's instructive to look at who the voters were who "propelled" Obama's victory.

Among white voters, according to exit polls, Obama lost by 12 percentage points, but he more than made up this deficit with his margins with African-American (91 points), Latino (36) and Asian (27) and "other" (35) voters. Women gave Obama a decisive 13-point advantage, compared to his narrow 1-point win among men.

Obama won among those making less than $50,000 a year by a 22-point margin; the votes of those who made more than $50,000 were evenly split. Union households went for the Democrat by a 20-point margin, vs. 4 points for non-union households. Seventy-six percent of those who disapprove of the Iraq War supported Obama; 86 percent of Iraq War supporters went for McCain.

Obviously, voters' opinions don't translate directly into politicians' actions; we'd live in a much different world if they did. But voters do matter enough that corporate media routinely try to wish them away.

Responding (11/13/08) to those "who would argue that the election of the first African-American president signaled the country has moved past the need to be concerned about racial equity," PBS.org's Dori J. Maynard writes that

it is true that some television networks put on air more African-American commentators during the campaign. Those additional voices, however, were not numerous enough to avoid the frequent appearance of all-white panels to discuss race relations. That lamentable pattern and other media missteps, such as a New York Times story on the shifting African-American landscape that did not quote any African-American sources, were vivid examples of why the traditional media's reputation and credibility depend on their ability to diversify their ranks as quickly as possible.

How far back does this "lamentable pattern" go? See FAIR's magazine Extra!: "A Different Race: The Black Press Reveals Gaps in Mainstream Election Coverage" (11-12/04) by Jacqueline Bacon

WeCanStopTheHate.org's latest push for "media networks... to separate themselves from hate groups and hate speech" quotes (11/14/08) National Council of La Raza President Janet Murguía saying that, with a recent race-motivated Long Island murder, "we have been brutally reminded about the consequences of leaving hate unchecked":

"The wave of hate that is seeping through our communities threatens the fabric of our nation and is costing lives. Americans will not be cowed by those trying to advance intolerance-we must stand up to the presence of hate groups and extremists" ...Murguía added.

Just yesterday, Media Matters for America released a report, ["Women, Minorities, Autistic Children: Conservative Radio's Vitriol Not Reserved for Obama"] which exposes attacks and generalizations made by some radio shock-jocks. The distortions made by some about immigrants and the Latino community have led to a growing climate of hate. FBI hate crime statistics show that attacks against Latinos have been on the rise over the past four years.

"Unfortunately, the climate that led to the tragic death of Marcello Lucero in Long Island is not new or anecdotal. Latinos have personally felt the impact of the wave of hate cloaked under the immigration debate," said Murguía.

Watch WeCanStopTheHate's excellent video "about the code words of hate and what your community can do to combat hate speech."

Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell (11/8/08) notes conservative columnist Kathleen Parker's "misty-eyed" writing (11/7/08) about the Obama victory: "The little speck of difference that kept us imperceptibly apart had been dissolved in a lovely instant of national consensus that race no longer matters." But he notes that not so long ago, that "little speck of difference" loomed much larger to Parker, who wrote back in May (5/14/08) that the election was about

fullbloodedness...about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots.... there is a very real sense that once-upon-a-time America is getting lost in the dash to diversity. We love to boast that we are a nation of immigrants--and we are. But there's a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice.

Of course, Obama's "bloodline"--that is, his mother's family--has been in this country for centuries; his grandfather fought in World War II. But one gets the sense, reading that May column, that the main point is that the opposite of "fullbloodedness" is "mixedbloodedness."

Mitchell points to Peggy Noonan as another columnist whose writings on Obama have gone from creepy to celebratory. In April, Noonan had been wondering (Wall Street Journal, 4/25/08) "about Obama and America"--" Who would have taught him to love it?"--contrasting his purportedly dubious attitude toward America's heritage with John McCain's, who "carries it in his bones." Now she's writing that "the explosion of joy in large pockets of the country Tuesday night was beautiful to see, and moving."